Parenting is a Joke

Jena Friedman talks with Ophira Eisenberg about the strange collision of grief, motherhood, politics, and the practical business of being a working comedian as she brings her solo show Motherf*cker from Edinburgh to New York. She explains why the missing “you” on the show poster is intentional—a visual representation of the hole grief leaves behind—and how a painting she made of her mother in high school ultimately became the poster after Jacqueline Novak suggested it during a FaceTime call. Jena also recounts the spectacularly dysfunctional Edinburgh venue where she performed: puddles of water around electrical cords, filthy fans, unreliable Wi-Fi, a separate box office that left audience members unable to get into the show, and Jena eventually standing outside with a bucket collecting ticket money. On one particularly brutal night, grief overwhelmed her during the final five minutes of the performance and she ugly-cried while continuing to deliver jokes she had memorized, then had to go outside and collect cash and loose change from the audience. That experience becomes part of a larger conversation about performing grief without turning it into acting, finding the right level of emotional control onstage, and what happens when audiences come backstage carrying their own losses; in Edinburgh, as many as ten people from a 120-seat audience might approach her after a show to tell her about someone they loved who had died. Jena talks about how her mother’s death while she was pregnant continues to surface in unexpected ways, including seeing her mother in her young son when he suddenly says “let me finish” over Vietnamese food, or hearing herself say the exact little phrase her mother used to say at night: “Kitchen is closed.” The parenting conversation then widens into Jena’s complicated hopefulness about raising a child in the age of AI and social media, her belief that despair can become a form of complacency, and her affection for the idea of “Fuck You Joy” as a way of staying engaged with life when the world feels bleak. By the end, the conversation has moved from the mechanics of collecting ticket money after crying onstage to the much quieter realization that Jena will never get to know her mother as a grandmother, a loss that surfaces in the simple thought that her son will never have the kind of elementary-school photo with grandparents that other families take for granted

📍October Shows are in Watertown, SD, Pennsylvania, Niagra Falls, Canada, Washington, DC, Catskill, and NYC

Follow Jena Friedman : https://www.instagram.com/jenafriedman

Get tickets to her Off-Broadway Show Motherf*cker: https://www.sohoplayhouse.com/see-a-show/jena-friedman-motherfucker

See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/

Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” is AVAILABLE on Amazon Primehttps://www.ophiraeisenberg.com

Listen to it as an Album: https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy

SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up

Follow PIAJ: 

https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/

https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/

Follow Ophira:

https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/

https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/

https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jena Friedman returns to Parenting Is a Joke with a now four-year-old, a new solo show called Motherf*cker, and a lot to say about what happens when motherhood, grief, politics, and a creative career start occupying the same space. She and host Ophira Eisenberg talk about the strange economics of being a working comedian—including Jena’s son looking at her $40 stand-up paycheck and asking, essentially, “That’s all you make?”—as well as the practical reality of getting to Edinburgh for 17 performances while trying not to be away from her child for too long. Jena explains how losing her mother to pancreatic cancer while she was 34 weeks pregnant changed the way she talks to her son about death, including the decision to make mortality less mysterious through conversations, The Lion King, Coco, and Día de los Muertos. She remembers being devastated while her eight-month-old son gently tucked her hair behind her ear, and later records a conversation in which her three-year-old tells her he doesn’t want her to die, listens to her explanation about death, and then immediately announces that he has farted on her knee. The conversation also turns toward the complicated guilt of considering another child, the fact that Jena froze her eggs, and the larger anxiety of raising a kid while worrying about climate change, artificial intelligence, regulation, and a future involving drones and locked bank accounts. That political anxiety feeds directly into Motherf*cker, which Jena describes as using the political comedy she knows how to do as a way to approach the grief she doesn’t know how to do; she also argues that comedy can become more interesting with age because perspective accumulates, illustrated by the brutally specific joke she delivered to younger colleagues grieving Trump’s 2024 election victory: wait until your mom dies. The episode keeps finding that same uneasy intersection of the personal and the political, ending with a shared desire for a mug that simply says, “Don’t talk to me until your mom has also died.”

📍October Shows are in Watertown, SD, Pennsylvania, Niagra Falls, Canada, Washington, DC, Catskill, and NYC

Follow Jena Friedman : https://www.instagram.com/jenafriedman

Get tickets to her Off-Broadway Show Motherf*cker: https://www.sohoplayhouse.com/see-a-show/jena-friedman-motherfucker

See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/

Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” is AVAILABLE on Amazon Primehttps://www.ophiraeisenberg.com

Listen to it as an Album: https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy

SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up

Follow PIAJ: 

https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/

https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/

Follow Ophira:

https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/

https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/

https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this snack-sized follow-up with host Ophira Eisenberg, comedian and author Marc Kaye digs into the split between fitting in and belonging that gives his essay collection its spine, admitting he's spent a lifetime chasing the former while quietly resenting how much it costs him, a distinction he says reframed the whole book once he stopped blaming other people for his own discomfort. The conversation turns most vivid around "Chance of Showers," the essay Mark almost cut from the manuscript because writing it forced him to relive the five-hour drive dropping his son Elliot off at college in Pittsburgh, where he realized the grief wasn't really about the empty bedroom. It was about his own unlived dreams, the ones he'd been shoving, as his girlfriend puts it, under "the lumpy rug." He walks through the advice he actually gave Elliot before move-in (make the kind of mistakes that become funny stories at 40, not the kind you carry as regret) and his own unfulfilled curiosity about a guided psilocybin retreat, name-checking Michael Pollan's "How to Change Your Mind" and the documentary "Fantastic Fungi" while making clear he wants a real facilitator, not "somebody hanging on South Street." He also traces the origin of his comedy album title, "I'm a Good Dad," back to a running joke with his kids after his own less-than-proud parenting moments, including the story he tells to close the episode, about buying his son a bulk box of Costco condoms before college, only to find it ripped open "like a monkey" on a closet shelf a year later while his own unsuspecting father stood right next to him.

📍September Shows are in Toronto, Canada, Cleveland & Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, MO, Saint Paul, MN, NYC

Follow Marc Kaye : https://www.instagram.com/awkwardlymarc

Buy his book: A Is For Awkward

https://www.marckayetoday.com/a-is-for-awkward

See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/

Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” is AVAILABLE on Amazon, Google Play and Apple!https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com

Listen to it as an Album: https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy

SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up

Follow PIAJ: 

https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/

https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/

Follow Ophira:

https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/

https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/

https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Comedian and debut essayist Marc Kaye joins host Ophira Eisenberg mid-vacation, sweat-soaked from a Yellowstone-to-Badlands road trip, to talk about the strange math of raising kids you can't actually engineer — a fitting theme from a guy with a mechanical engineering-turned-raver son and a musical-theater daughter now working inside the Bureau of Prisons at Fort Dix. Mark, who spent a year teaching biology in Camden through Teach for America, walks through the genetics lesson that quietly reordered his whole parenting philosophy: two parents, 23 chromosome pairs each, roughly eight million possible combinations before you even get to eye color, proof, he argues, that most of what parents take credit for was never in their hands to begin with. That idea threads into two very different formative stories: his post-college stint as a Big Brother paired with a kid with "violent tendencies" (a 138-pound psychology grad's crash course in letting go of outcomes), and the moment his son, mid-meltdown, declared the family dog-attacked stuffed animal "Bob is blind" — a small domestic crisis Mark still can't quite explain his own panic over. He and Ophira also dig into growing up with older, more rigid parents shaped by World War II, DIY households versus outsourced adulthood, and Mark's theory, half joke, half warning, that couples should have to do a Catholic-style pre-Cana before marriage, since nothing prepares you for becoming "a different person" alongside another one under exhaustion and diapers. Mark's new essay collection, "A Is for Awkward and Other Reflections on Belonging," and his comedy album "I'm a Good Dad" both hover in the background of a conversation that keeps circling back to one blunt, useful phrase he uses often with his now-grown kids: you get what you get, and you don't get upset.

📍September Shows are in Toronto, Canada, Cleveland & Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, MO, Saint Paul, MN, NYC

Follow Marc Kaye : https://www.instagram.com/awkwardlymarc

Buy his book: A Is For Awkward

https://www.marckayetoday.com/a-is-for-awkward

See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/

Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” is AVAILABLE on Amazon, Google Play and Apple!https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com

Listen to it as an Album: https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy

SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up

Follow PIAJ: 

https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/

https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/

Follow Ophira:

https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/

https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/

https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode of Parenting Is a Joke, Ophira Eisenberg talks with Sona Movsesian, author of The World’s Worst Mom and The World’s Worst Assistant and co-host of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, about the strange overlap between parenting, creative work, anxiety, and the relentless business of keeping two five-year-old boys alive. Sona explains why she and her husband gave their twins the reassuringly ordinary names Charles and Michael—despite her Armenian family background and the guilt she still feels about not choosing more traditional names—and how giving them Armenian middle names became her compromise with her ancestors. She also describes writing The World’s Worst Mom while her sons were growing from three to five, which meant the book itself changed as the children did; one chapter, in which her subconscious addresses her, was so aggressively self-critical that her friend Nora told her to be nicer to herself, while Sona’s husband illustrated the transformation from her pre-kids “flower child” subconscious into something resembling the blob from The Substance. The conversation takes a much heavier turn when Sona recounts losing her Altadena home in a wildfire when the twins were three and a half, choosing not to tell them that their house had burned because she wanted home to feel permanent and safe, even as the adults dealt with their own trauma and the long process of rebuilding. There is dark comedy amid the loss—Sona is genuinely relieved that the fire eliminated their old diaper genie and some terrible shirts—but the things that mattered most to her children survived: the stuffed animals they had slept with since infancy. That instinct to protect children from adult fear runs through the episode, including Sona’s description of fertility treatment and pregnancy with twins, when she refused to “celebrate before you win the game” and kept baby preparations deliberately minimal until her sons were safely in her arms. Parenting then becomes an exercise in sleep-deprived consumerism as she recalls ordering every vibrating toy, pillow, sound machine, and supposed sleep solution she could find online when one twin would not sleep, including a $50 weighted suit that made the baby look like a gingerbread cookie and that he absolutely hated. The twins’ radically different personalities also shape the comedy: one stays relatively close while the other is a self-described nomad who wanders off, including at Disneyland and at a botanical garden, where Sona eventually received a call from a security guard after her son used the phone number she had taught him. As the boys prepare for school, Sona admits that having twins gives her a built-in advantage because each child has the other as a familiar face, even though one of them has melted down at virtually every camp or first day of school, dramatically reaching a hand toward her and yelling “Mama” while she has to walk away. The episode ultimately connects Sona’s creative career to the same instinct that drives her parenting: anticipating needs, managing logistics, and accepting that perfection is not the assignment, a lesson perfectly embodied by her fantasy for a third book, The World’s Worst Beach House Owner, followed by her modest new standard for success—buying another house that simply doesn’t burn down.

📍September Shows are in Toronto, Canada, Cleveland & Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, MO, Saint Paul, MN, NYC

Follow Sona Movsesian : https://www.instagram.com/sonamov

Buy her book: The World’s Worst Mom: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/785801/the-worlds-worst-mom-by-sona-movsesian/

See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/

Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” as an ALBUM is available now https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy

SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up

Follow PIAJ: 

https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/

https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/

Follow Ophira:

https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/

https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/

https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the Season 5 premiere of Parenting Is a Joke, Ophira Eisenberg talks with Sona Movsesian—co-host of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, former longtime Conan O’Brien assistant, and author of The World’s Worst Mom—about becoming a mother without ever having pictured herself as one, and about building a creative career around the unpredictable logistics of raising children. Their conversation begins with a fitting technological disaster: the two women spend 45 minutes switching laptops, sign-ins, servers, and microphones before finally getting the connection to work, with Sona appearing on video as a “foreheadless Sona” because neither wants to risk touching anything that might break the internet again. From there, Sona describes life with her five-year-old twins, Charlie and Mikey, and the unusual presence of her friend Brad, a comedian and writer who moonlights as their nanny and has become “Uncle” Brad to the boys. She recalls her pre-parenthood life as a five-a.m. party girl who kept toothpaste, deodorant, makeup, and a change of clothes ready for whatever morning she happened to wake up in, then explains how meeting her husband made her want “humans that are the combination of the two of us.” The discussion turns to fertility, the expectation that conception should simply happen, and the strange emotional math of discovering how common fertility treatments and miscarriage actually are; Sona jokes that she had taken the morning-after pill repeatedly before realizing she might have saved herself the money, while Eisenberg observes that if she had been slightly less responsible in high school, she might already have had a child in college. Sona also describes becoming pregnant with twins through IVF at 38, abandoning any romantic notion of childbirth once her doctors strongly recommended a C-section, and declaring, in effect, that after hormone injections and having her babies “manufactured,” she was perfectly happy to skip the water breaking and get everyone out safely. One of the episode’s most striking creative-life intersections comes when Sona remembers that Conan’s final late-night show fell exactly one week before her scheduled C-section: she hoped the boys would stay put long enough for her to attend, and they did, leaving her so pregnant at the after-party that several people had to help her stand up from a chair. Three days before the twins were born, her 96-year-old grandfather died, making the end of Conan’s show, the end of Sona’s role as his day-to-day assistant, her grandfather’s death, and the birth of her sons feel like an extraordinary cluster of endings and beginnings. The two comedians then make the surprisingly persuasive case that years of assisting Conan prepared Sona for motherhood, since anticipating where a 55-year-old boss will need to sit, eat, change clothes, find a bathroom, and get from one place to another is not so different from managing two five-year-olds—except, as Sona points out, she can finally prioritize the twins instead. The episode closes on the tension between competence and creative ambition: Sona jokes that if she had treated Conan the way she now manages her sons, she would have been the greatest assistant imaginable, but that this hard-won organizational skill came too late to help her write her first book while working for him. Her twins holding on long enough for her to watch Conan’s final show—and the image of multiple people physically lifting her out of a chair afterward—becomes the episode’s perfect collision of parenting, work, timing, and the absurd logistics of trying to do everything at once.

📍September Shows are in Toronto, Canada, Cleveland & Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, MO, Saint Paul, MN, NYC

Follow Sona Movsesian : https://www.instagram.com/sonamov

Buy her book: The World’s Worst Mom: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/785801/the-worlds-worst-mom-by-sona-movsesian/

See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/

Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” as an ALBUM is available now https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy

SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up

Follow PIAJ: 

https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/

https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/

Follow Ophira:

https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/

https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/

https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Host Ophira Eisenberg brings back this favorite episode with Adam Cayton-Holland in celebration of his new film See You When I See You recently featured at the Sundance Film Festival, the Nantucket Film Festival, and more.  They talk about the peculiar math of building a creative life around two young children, five-year-old Malcolm and a two-year-old, and how becoming a parent turned the ambitious comedian who once imagined “conquering the world” into someone who now negotiates club weekends down to the hour so he can catch the first flight home. His new special Wallpaper gets its title from his observation that once you have kids, you become the supporting character in your own life, and he admits that dialing back his career was less a sacrifice than a necessary recognition that his children changed what he wanted from his time; after two days away, he misses his boys enough to optimize every travel itinerary around getting home. That shift extends to his wife, who initially imagined she would be “alpha mom” but discovered she also needed time to be a person outside motherhood, and to the small rituals of being a touring dad, like bringing his wife coffee beans and his sons treats from airports—after learning the hard way that three stuffed animals are considerably less useful to a two-year-old than plane pretzels. The conversation also moves into Cayton-Holland’s history as a Denver comedian who helped build the city’s DIY comedy scene with The Grawlix, his early work as a substitute teacher, and the strange realization that he was good with little kids but terrible with middle schoolers, whom he describes as having adult feelings and no acceptable outlet except cruelty. The emotional center of the episode is his family history and the death of his younger sister Lydia, whose depression, OCD, and suicide forced him to confront his own anxiety and fears about passing mental illness to his children; he talks about EMDR therapy, the recurring traumatic memories he eventually learned to “file away,” and how writing his memoir Tragedy Plus Time gave him a way to tell Lydia’s story with the care he felt it required. Rather than treating comedy as automatic healing, he explains why he initially stopped performing altogether, then eventually returned through a one-man show where audiences understand that the story can be funny without pretending everything is okay. Parenting brings the conversation back to the everyday indignities of raising children, from a five-year-old who threatens to call the police because his mother ran a yellow light to the nightly competition over which parent gets chosen at bedtime, while Cayton-Holland quietly counts his teeth when his mind wanders—and still somehow insists there are 32 of them when he actually has 28.

📍August Shows are in Las Vegas NV, Los Angeles CA, NYC

Follow Adam Cayton-Holland: https://www.instagram.com/caytonholland

See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/

Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” as an ALBUM is available now https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy

SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up

Follow PIAJ: 

https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/

https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/

Follow Ophira:

https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/

https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/

https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Carlos Greaves returns to the podcast for a closer look at the surprisingly authoritarian role of parenting, beginning with his 18-month-old daughter’s new favorite activity: climbing things that are clearly designed for five-year-olds and launching herself toward a seven-foot drop. With essentially no childcare experience before becoming a dad—he had never even changed a diaper until the nurse handed him his daughter in the hospital—Greaves describes figuring out parenting through research, YouTube, books, and an engineer’s instinct to identify what he doesn’t know, while remaining skeptical of advice that seems to reverse itself every five years. He and Ophira Eisenberg wrestle with the line between letting kids make mistakes and protecting them from hurting themselves or other people, with Greaves admitting that he currently operates at “dad reflex distance,” close enough to catch his daughter but far enough away that she learns to solve problems herself. That tension leads naturally into the mythology of childhood: Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the little stories parents tell to make life easier. Greaves remembers his father initially refusing to participate in Santa because he considered it lying, then eventually sitting his eight- or nine-year-old son down to explain the truth—only to be hit with the immediate existential question, “If Santa Claus isn’t real, does that mean God isn’t real?” Greaves now sees those childhood myths differently, remembering the pleasure of watching younger siblings discover Christmas magic and deciding that if you are going to lie to your kids, it should be for their benefit rather than simply to make your own life easier. The conversation also takes aim at the impossible standards of modern parenting, from organic cotton and wooden toys to BPA-free bottles and the endless question of what, exactly, has replaced the thing labeled “BPA free,” before Greaves offers his own survival tactic for parenting’s tiny dictators: eat your snacks in secret before they become smart enough to notice. When Ophira asks what he would tell a child who eventually wants to become either a comedian or a politician, Greaves’s answer is revealingly consistent with his satirical worldview: he can live with either, as long as they do not become an asshole—and preferably, she becomes an electrical engineer.

📍August Shows are in Las Vegas NV, Los Angeles CA, NYC

Follow Carlos Greaves: https://www.instagram.com/shadesofgreaves

Check out his new book Obey In Advance: How To Survive (And Thrive) Under Authoritarianism: https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/obey-in-advance-how-to-survive-and-thrive-under-authoritarianism

See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/

Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” as an ALBUM is available now https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy

SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up

Follow PIAJ: 

https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/

https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/

Follow Ophira:

https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/

https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/

https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Carlos Greaves joins Ophira Eisenberg to talk about the strange math of building a creative career while raising an 18-month-old daughter, especially when your “job” is a shifting collection of satire writing, freelance work, teaching, and comedy. Greaves describes leaving electrical engineering after a film class convinced him he had chosen the wrong life, spending 12 years writing before opportunities at McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, and elsewhere made comedy feel possible, and then discovering that the creative life he wanted came with plenty of regrets—and very little stability. As a stay-at-home dad in suburban Charlotte, he is constantly negotiating what it even means to be a working parent when his work happens at night and on weekends, while his wife’s nine-to-five schedule means their respective “breaks” are essentially childcare traded for work; meanwhile, Ophira admits that 96% of her conversations with her husband are scheduling logistics. Their conversation turns to Greaves’s book Obey in Advance: How to Survive and Thrive Under Authoritarianism, co-written with Ginny Hogan, and the challenge of writing political satire when reality moves faster than a joke and social media can claim a premise before a book ever reaches publication. Greaves explains why the book targets the atmosphere and institutions surrounding authoritarianism rather than relying on familiar impressions, using forms like Mad Libs, word searches, and fake editorial templates to make frighteningly repetitive political patterns visible—and argues that preserving joy can itself be a form of resistance. That idea becomes especially complicated as a parent: Greaves admits that bringing a child into a world facing climate change and multiple other existential threats requires optimism, even as he feels the terror of having “a piece of your soul outside your body” that eventually has to go out into the world. The episode also connects his instinct for satire to his childhood as an intensely rule-following, oldest-child, parent-pleaser who quietly found ways around the rules, including telling his parents he was sleeping at one friend’s house when he was actually somewhere else. The conversation ends just as Ophira starts asking about the unavoidable dictator hiding inside every parent of a toddler—and Greaves’s Ferris Bueller-adjacent teenage rule-skimming is the last thing left hanging before they pick up the story in part two.

📍August Shows are in Las Vegas NV, Los Angeles CA, NYC

Follow Carlos Greaves: https://www.instagram.com/shadesofgreaves

Check out his new book Obey In Advance: How To Survive (And Thrive) Under Authoritarianism: https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/obey-in-advance-how-to-survive-and-thrive-under-authoritarianism

See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/

Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” as an ALBUM is available now https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy

SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up

Follow PIAJ: 

https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/

https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/

Follow Ophira:

https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/

https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/

https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sabrina Bendory returns to talk about the origin story of her very first book, 10 Things Every Woman Needs to Know About Men — a title that started with her getting ghosted, then accidentally called back by the same guy who meant to dial his new hookup, and being sat down that same night by her male roommate and his friend for a blunt, point-by-point translation of everything men actually mean when they say things like "I've never liked a girl this much." She and Ophira dig into how that same decoding work now applies to men who come to her for coaching too — something she didn't expect until requests started arriving after Detached, including from tattooed, tough-looking guys admitting, unprompted, that they have "mother issues" they want to work through. The conversation turns sharper when Bendory revisits Nick, the ex from her book who told her he'd never "breed" with someone like her, and she names exactly what that relationship taught her: mistaking anxiety for chemistry, and hope for intuition. From there she and Ophira spend real time dismantling Sex and the City — Bendory explains how she rewatched the whole series during a COVID quarantine with three sick kids and no childcare, posted one TikTok tearing apart Carrie and Big, and woke up to it having gone viral days later — arguing that Big spends six seasons explicitly telling Carrie he doesn't want her (down to failing to say "you're the one" in season one) and gets rewarded with a Paris rooftop ending anyway. The episode closes on Bendory's clearest parenting-adjacent line yet: that picking a stable, undramatic partner isn't boring, it's strategic, because life, kids, aging parents, money, loss is already hard enough without a relationship that requires managing someone else's chaos on top of it.

📍August Shows are in Las Vegas NV, Los Angeles CA, NYC

Follow Sabrina Bendory: https://www.instagram.com/sabrinabendory

Check out her new book The Feminine Code: https://www.instagram.com/sabrinabendory

Check out the kids album you'll love, Magnificent by Lachi: https://platoon.lnk.to/magnificent

See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/

Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” as an ALBUM is available now https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy

SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up

Follow PIAJ: 

https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/

https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/

Follow Ophira:

https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/

https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/

https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices